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tongoscar

In Hong Kong, the coronavirus outbreak is deepening the political divide from the 2019 ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Rumors had spread that toilet paper supply would be cut off due to new border closures with mainland China, implemented in an effort to contain the novel coronavirus outbreak.
  • The government's reassurances and calls for order went unheeded as millions of residents, gripped by fear and suspicion, descended on stores citywide to panic buy.The novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, was first detected in Hong Kong on January 22. Since then, there have been 62 confirmed cases and two deaths in the city.
  • The numbers are far lower than in mainland China, where at least 1,868 people have died so far -- but Hong Kong carries the memories of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, and people aren't taking any chances.
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  • By the time she withdrew the bill -- that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited across the border to mainland China -- protesters' demands had expanded to include action on deeper social grievances.
  • In January, many Hong Kongers across various sectors, including elected lawmakers, called to shut Hong Kong's borders with mainland China to contain the virus. But these demands also reintroduced familiar strands of localism, an ideology focused on preserving Hong Kong's autonomy.
  • This is why closing the Chinese borders is a politically significant and symbolic act -- and perhaps why Lam resisted doing so for weeks.
  • The 2019 protest movement may appear to have fizzled out -- but it educated an entire city and generation of youth on organized resistance. Now, this spirit of political action has been redirected toward the outbreak, as people protest for a stronger government response.More than 7,000 health care workers participated in a week-long union strike in early February to demand closed borders; that's nearly 10% of all medical staff of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority.The labor union that organized the strike was one of several born from the 2019 unrest, founded during the tail end of the protests.
  • Hong Kong's schools are shut until at least mid-March, and many businesses have closed or have instructed employees to work from home.With cases of community transmission confirmed, many people are staying at home for weeks at a time to avoid infection, only venturing out for groceries or quick strolls.
  • Fear and anger are palpable in the city, especially earlier this week with the disappearance of two people who violated quarantine after returning from mainland China. They were found after being added to a police wanted list.
tongoscar

Coronavirus latest news: British passengers left in limbo over Diamond Princess evacuation - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...a-diamond-princess-cruise-ship

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • British passengers on the coronavirus-hit cruise ship moored near Tokyo have criticised the "slow" response from the UK government, stating that they feel like they have been "left behind". 
  • Yesterday, some 500 passengers who tested negative were allowed to disembark, but the British Foreign Office (FCO) has urged UK nationals to stay on board until they can organise a flight home. 
  • People in China are turning to interesting methods to avoid human-to-human contact amid the coronavirus outbreak.
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  • The World Health Organization has said that the first person to be infected with the disease in Africa is now in recovery. 
  • China’s central bank said on Wednesday the impact of the coronavirus on the economy will be limited as the epidemic has not changed the country’s economic fundamentals, Reuters reported.
  • Egypt, Algeria and South Africa were at the highest risk of importing a COVID-19 case from China, but had moderate to high preparedness and low vulnerability. 
katherineharron

In race for coronavirus vaccine, hurled insults and the wisdom of Spider-Man - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.
  • Oxford has recently walked back some of its optimism, but for months, it set a tone that its vaccine was the most promising, without any solid evidence that this was based in fact.
  • Third, one leader in the Oxford team has gone so far as to denigrate other teams trying to get a Covid vaccine on the market, calling their technology "weird" and labeling it as merely "noise." Such name-calling is highly unusual and aggressive among scientists.
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  • "At this point, the Oxford researchers have no idea whether they have something or not," Offit said. "You just get so tired of this 'science by press release.' "
  • There are currently 10 vaccines in human clinical trials worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Four of the teams are in the United States: Moderna, Pfizer, Inovio and Novavax.
  • Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel referred to the results as "positive interim Phase 1 data" and that "the Moderna team continues to focus on moving as fast as safely possible to start our pivotal Phase 3 study in July."
  • Moderna is collaborating on its vaccine development with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said while Moderna's numbers were limited, "it was good news" and he was "cautiously optimistic" about the vaccine.
  • Inovio and Moderna have said they expect their large-scale clinical trials, known as Phase 3 trials, to last around six months. Pfizer hasn't given a timetable for its Phase 3 trial.
  • "I've not seen anyone wrap up a Phase 3 trial in a month to six weeks," said Dr. Saad Omer, a Yale University infectious disease expert who's done clinical trials on polio, pertussis and influenza vaccines. "We need to benchmark this against realistic expectations."
  • "As vaccine researchers like to say, mice lie and monkeys exaggerate," Offit said.
  • One big stumbling block for any vaccine trial is that Covid-19 infection rates in many areas of the world are flattening out or declining.
  • The Oxford vaccine uses what's called an adenovirus vector. Adenoviruses cause the common cold, but in this case, the adenoviruses are weakened and modified to deliver genetic material that codes for a protein from the novel coronavirus. The body then produces that protein and, ideally, develops an immune response to it.
  • "Compared to previous vaccines, this method is more robust, more versatile, and yet, equally efficient," according to the blog, which notes that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $53 million in a German biotech company that specializes in RNA vaccines.
  • Inovio's technology uses a brief electrical pulse to deliver plasmids, or small pieces of genetic information, into human cells. Inovio says those cells then produce the vaccine, which leads to an immune response.
  • On April 19, the BBC's Andrew Marr said he asked Gilbert "if it's guaranteed that a workable vaccine can actually be produced."
  • "Nobody can be absolutely sure it's possible. That's why we have to do trials. We have to find out. I think the prospects are very good, but it's clearly not completely certain,"
  • "It certainly worked in monkeys," Oxford's Hill told CNN's Burnett May 15. "That was quite an impressive impact and that was our first try, if you like, with a standard dose, a single dose of vaccine."
  • "I buy that this is a pandemic and we may need to show progress and show steps, and I'm OK with making forecasts if decision makers want that, but do it with a level of uncertainty, because that's what's warranted," said Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
  • "Now researchers can't wait to step out to the microphone -- and there are so many microphones out there -- to say, 'I've got it! This looks really good!' " Offit said.
katherineharron

The US is asking other countries for everything from hand sanitizer to ventilators to h... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration is appealing to countries around the world to give or sell the US items as basic as hand sanitizer and as complex as respirators to combat the surging coronavirus pandemic.
  • The requests come as President Donald Trump touts his domestic response and declines to deploy the full power of the federal government's Defense Production Act to produce and funnel crucial supplies to struggling states and hospitals. It's not clear how many countries the US has appealed to.
  • The administration is making these private appeals as Trump is striking a starkly different note in public. At Tuesday's daily coronavirus briefing from the White House, not long after he had called the South Korean leader, the President veered into campaign-style rhetoric, declaring that, "America will never be a supplicant nation."
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  • "My job at the White House right now is to help find whatever the American people need and buy it from wherever we can, and if we need to send a plane to go get it, we'll get that done using the full force of government and private enterprise," Mr. Navarro said
  • "If China or any other country has some masks, gloves or other products we need for the American people, we welcome that with open arms," he said.
  • "Hopefully we can match up external suppliers, external sources with states and entities in the US that actually need them," they said.
  • New York alone had over 25,000 known infections on Tuesday and 210 dead. Its governor, Andrew Cuomo, angrily told reporters that he needed "30,000" ventilators.
katherineharron

Fact Check: Trump wildly exaggerates Spanish Flu mortality rate - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As the tally of coronavirus cases and deaths in the US continues to rise, President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force addressed questions Tuesday during a virtual town hall hosted by Fox News.
  • Facts First: Trump is exaggerating. Though estimates of the mortality rate for the 1918 flu pandemic vary widely since records from that period are incomplete, there are not any credible estimates as high as 50%. Scholars estimate the mortality rate is between about 2% and 20%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 50 million people worldwide died from the H1N1 virus in 1918 and 1919, out of the approximately 500 million people who were infected.
  • "Net, net you can find credible death rate estimates from 2-10 percent," Dr. Brilliant said. "Either way that is a far cry from 50 percent."
katherineharron

With Joe Biden off the trail, Democratic super PACs race to fill the void - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With traditional campaigning abandoned and the Democrats' presidential front-runner hunkered down at home, deep-pocketed Democratic groups are racing to hit President Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "This crisis could be the defining issue of this election," Kyle Tharp, of the nonprofit group Acronym, said Wednesday. "Now more than ever, voters need to be made aware of how Trump's handling of this threat and downplaying of its impact has made it worse and has made Americans less safe."
  • "Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it," the narrator says, before saying that Trump "let the virus spread unchecked across America."
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  • The pandemic, which had infected more than 64,000 and killed at least 900 in the US as of Wednesday evening, has upended American life and brought the economy to a halt a little more than seven months before the general election.
  • A new Gallup poll shows 60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, while 38% disapprove. A Monmouth University survey shows a tighter margin: 50% say the President has done a good job; 45% say he has done a bad job.
  • Perrine called Democrats' ads "disgusting" and a "politicization" of the pandemic.
  • "There'll be plenty of time for voters to judge @realDonaldTrump & his handling of the Coronavirus crisis, including the first weeks when he sent dangerously misleading signals by downplaying the threat," David Axelrod, a CNN contributor and former aide to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter as the first round of coronavirus advertising began to emerge last week.
  • Using Trump's own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential," Plouffe tweeted.
katherineharron

List: Two more members of Congress test positive for Covid-19 - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania are the latest members of Congress to test positive for Covid-19, their offices announced Friday.
  • In addition, more than two dozen lawmakers have also self-quarantined or taken other steps to isolate themselves as a precaution after interacting either directly or potentially with an infected individual.
Javier E

How the leading coronavirus vaccines made it to the finish line - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...covid-vaccine-messenger-rna

vaccine R&D science profit innovation discovery research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic’s silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases.
  • Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what’s possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.
  • Long before the pandemic, Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance.
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  • Messenger RNA is a powerful, if fickle, component of life’s building blocks — a workhorse of the cell that is also truly just a messenger, unstable and prone to degrade.
  • . In 1990,
  • That same year, a team at the University of Wisconsin startled the scientific world with a paper that showed it was possible to inject a snippet of messenger RNA into mice and turn their muscle cells into factories, creating proteins on demand.
  • If custom-designed RNA snippets could be used to turn cells into bespoke protein factories, messenger RNA could become a powerful medical tool. It could encode fragments of virus to teach the immune system to defend against pathogens. It could also create whole proteins that are missing or damaged in people with devastating genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
  • In 2005, the pair discovered a way to modify RNA, chemically tweaking one of the letters of its code, so it didn’t trigger an inflammatory response. Deborah Fuller, a scientist who works on RNA and DNA vaccines at the University of Washington, said that work deserves a Nobel Prize.
  • messenger RNA posed a bigger challenge than other targets.“It’s tougher — it’s a much bigger molecule, it’s much more unstable,”
  • Unlike fields that were sparked by a single powerful insight, Sahin said that the recent success of messenger RNA vaccines is a story of countless improvements that turned an alluring biological idea into a beneficial technology.
  • “This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions,” said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade. He kept his word: Until the coronavirus sped things along, BioNTech projected the launch of its first commercial project in 2023.
  • “It’s new to you,” Fuller said. “But for basic researchers, it’s been long enough. . . . Even before covid, everyone was talking: RNA, RNA, RNA.”
  • All vaccines are based on the same underlying idea: training the immune system to block a virus. Old-fashioned vaccines do this work by injecting dead or weakened viruses
  • ewer vaccines use distinctive bits of the virus, such as proteins on their surface, to teach the lesson. The latest genetic techniques, like messenger RNA, don’t take as long to develop because those virus bits don’t have to be generated in a lab. Instead, the vaccine delivers a genetic code that instructs cells to build those characteristic proteins themselves.
  • They wanted the immune system to learn to recognize the thumb tack spike, so McLellan tasked a scientist in his laboratory with identifying genetic mutations that could anchor the protein into the right configuration. It was a painstaking process for Nianshuang Wang, who now works at a biotechnology company, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. After trying hundreds of genetic mutations, he found two that worked. Five journals rejected the finding, questioning its significance, before it was published in 2017.
  • That infection opened Graham’s eyes to an opportunity. HKU1 was merely a nuisance, as opposed to a deadly pneumonia; that meant it would be easier to work with in the lab, since researchers wouldn’t have to don layers of protective gear and work in a pressurized laboratory.
  • Severe acute respiratory syndrome had emerged in 2003. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) broke out in 2012. It seemed clear to Graham and Jason McLellan, a structural biologist now at the University of Texas at Austin, that new coronaviruses were jumping into people on a 10-year-clock and it might be time to brace for the next one.
  • Last winter, when Graham heard rumblings of a new coronavirus in China, he brought the team back together. Once its genome was shared online by Chinese scientists, the laboratories in Texas and Maryland designed a vaccine, utilizing the stabilizing mutations and the knowledge they had gained from years of basic research — a weekend project thanks to the dividends of all that past work.
  • Graham needed a technology that could deliver it into the body — and had already been working with Moderna, using its messenger RNA technology to create a vaccine against a different bat virus, Nipah, as a dress rehearsal for a real pandemic. Moderna and NIH set the Nipah project aside and decided to go forward with a coronavirus vaccine.
  • On Jan. 13, Moderna’s Moore came into work and found her team already busy translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days.
  • At BioNTech, Sahin said that even in the early design phases of its vaccine candidates, he incorporated the slight genetic changes designed in Graham’s lab that would make the spike look more like the real thing. At least two other companies would incorporate that same spike.
  • If all goes well with regulators, the coronavirus vaccines have the makings of a pharmaceutical industry fairy tale. The world faced an unparalleled threat, and companies leaped into the fight. Pfizer plowed $2 billion into the effort. Massive infusions of government cash helped remove the financial risks for Moderna.
  • But the world will also owe their existence to many scientists outside those companies, in government and academia who pursued ideas they thought were important even when the world doubted them
  • Some of those scientists will receive remuneration, since their inventions are licensed and integrated into the products that could save the world.
  • As executives become billionaires, many scientists think it is fair to earn money from their inventions that can help them do more important work. But McLellan’s laboratory at the University of Texas is proud to have licensed an even more potent version of their spike protein, royalty-free, to be incorporated into a vaccine for low and middle income countries.
  • “They’re using the technology that [Kariko] and I developed,” he said. “We feel like it’s our vaccine, and we are incredibly excited — at how well it’s going, and how it’s going to be used to get rid of this pandemic.”
  • “People hear about [vaccine progress] and think someone just thought about it that night. The amount of work — it’s really a beautiful story of fundamental basic research,” Fauci said. “It was chancy, in the sense that [the vaccine technology] was new. We were aware there would be pushback. The proof in the pudding is a spectacular success.”
  • The Vaccine Research Center, where Graham is deputy director, was the brainchild of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was created in 1997 to bring together scientists and physicians from different disciplines to defeat diseases, with a heavy focus on HIV.
  • the pandemic wasn’t a sudden eureka moment — it was a catalyst that helped ignite lines of research that had been moving forward for years, far outside the spotlight of a global crisis.
Javier E

The Real Reason You and Your Neighbor Make Different Covid-19 Risk Decisions - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-19-risk-decisions-11632063600

risk assessment rationality psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Personality traits that are shaped by genetics and early life experiences strongly influence our Covid-19-related decisions, studies from the U.S. and Japan have found.
  • In a study of more than 400 U.S. adults, Dr. Byrne and her colleagues found that how people perceive risks, whether they make risky decisions, and their preference for immediate or delayed rewards were the largest predictors of whether they followed public-health guidelines when it came to wearing masks and social distancing.
  • These factors accounted for 55% of the difference in people’s behaviors—more than people’s political affiliation, level of education or age.
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  • Dr. Byrne and her colleagues measured risky decision-making by presenting people with a gambling scenario. They could choose between two bets: One offered a guaranteed amount of money, while the other offered the possibility of a larger amount of money but also the possibility of receiving no cash. A different exercise measured people’s preference for immediate versus delayed rewards: Participants could choose a certain amount of money now, or a larger amount later.
  • Study subjects also reported Covid-19 precautions they had taken in their daily lives, including masking and social distancing.
  • with Covid-19, people don’t feel sick immediately after an exposure so the benefits of wearing a mask, social distancing or getting vaccinated aren’t immediately apparent. “You don’t see the lives you potentially save,” she says
  • “People generally are more motivated by immediate gratification or immediate benefits rather than long-term benefits, even when the long-term benefits are much greater,
  • Research has also found being extroverted or introverted affects how people make decisions about Covid-19 precautions. A recent study of more than 8,500 people in Japan published in the journal PLOS One in October 2020 found that those who scored high on a scale of extraversion were 7% less likely to wear masks in public and avoid large gatherings, among other precautions.
  • The study also found that people who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness—valuing hard work and achievement—were 31% more likely to follow Covid-19 public-health precautions.
  • Scientists believe that a person’s propensity to take risks is partly genetic and partly the result of early life experiences
  • Certain negative childhood experiences including physical, emotional or sexual abuse, parental divorce, or living with someone who was depressed or abused drugs or alcohol are linked to risky behavior in adulthood like smoking and drinking heavily, other research has found.
  • Studies of twins have generally found that about 30% of the difference in individual risk tolerance is genetic
  • And scientists have discovered that the brains of people who are more willing to take risks look different than those of people who are more cautious.
  • ambling task had differences in the structure and function of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in detecting threats, and the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in executive
  • Even people who have the same information and a similar perception of the risks may make different decisions because of the ways they interpret the information. When public-health officials talk about breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals being rare, for example, “rare means different things” to different people
Javier E

What Do We Lose If We Lose Twitter? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672158

social media twitter effect

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • What do we lose if we lose Twitter?
  • At its best, Twitter can still provide that magic of discovering a niche expert or elevating a necessary, insurgent voice, but there is far more noise than signal. Plenty of those overenthusiastic voices, brilliant thinkers, and influential accounts have burned out on culture-warring, or have been harassed off the site or into lurking.
  • Twitter is, by some standards, a niche platform, far smaller than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The internet will evolve or mutate around a need for it. I am aware that all of us who can’t quit the site will simply move on when we have to.
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  • Perhaps the best example of what Twitter offers now—and what we stand to gain or lose from its demise—is illustrated by the path charted by public-health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, and nurses over the past three years.
  • They offered guidance that a flailing government response was too slow to provide, and helped cobble together an epidemiological picture of infections and case counts. At a moment when people were terrified and looking for any information at all, Twitter seemed to offer a steady stream of knowledgeable, diligent experts.
  • But Twitter does another thing quite well, and that’s crushing users with the pressures of algorithmic rewards and all of the risks, exposure, and toxicity that come with virality
  • t imagining a world without it can feel impossible. What do our politics look like without the strange feedback loop of a Twitter-addled political press and a class of lawmakers that seems to govern more via shitposting than by legislation
  • What happens if the media lose what the writer Max Read recently described as a “way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it”? The answer is probably messy.
  • here’s the worry that, absent a distributed central nervous system like Twitter, “the collective worldview of the ‘media’ would instead be over-shaped, from the top down, by the experiences and biases of wealthy publishers, careerist editors, self-loathing journalists, and canny operators operating in relatively closed social and professional circles.”
  • many of the most hyperactive, influential twitterati (cringe) of the mid-2010s have built up large audiences and only broadcast now: They don’t read their mentions, and they rarely engage. In private conversations, some of those people have expressed a desire to see Musk torpedo the site and put a legion of posters out of their misery.
  • Many of the past decade’s most polarizing and influential figures—people such as Donald Trump and Musk himself, who captured attention, accumulated power, and fractured parts of our public consciousness—were also the ones who were thought to be “good” at using the website.
  • the effects of Twitter’s chief innovation—its character limit—on our understanding of language, nuance, and even truth.
  • “These days, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us,” he said. “The fact that you have a social media that tells you how many characters to use, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What’s the game there?
  • in McLuhanian fashion, the constraints and the architecture change not only what messages we receive but how we choose to respond. Often that choice is to behave like the platform itself: We are quicker to respond and more aggressive than we might be elsewhere, with a mindset toward engagement and visibility
  • it’s easy to argue that we stand to gain something essential and human if we lose Twitter. But there is plenty about Twitter that is also essential and human.
  • No other tool has connected me to the world—to random bits of news, knowledge, absurdist humor, activism, and expertise, and to scores of real personal interactions—like Twitter has
  • What makes evaluating a life beyond Twitter so hard is that everything that makes the service truly special is also what makes it interminable and toxic.
  • the worst experience you can have on the platform is to “win” and go viral. Generally, it seems that the more successful a person is at using Twitter, the more they refer to it as a hellsite.
Javier E

What Did Twitter Turn Us Into? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672249

twitter social media press journalism

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • The bedlam of Twitter, fused with the brevity of its form, offers an interpretation of the virtual town square as a bustling, modernist city.
  • It’s easy to get stuck in a feedback loop: That which appears on Twitter is current (if not always true), and what’s current is meaningful, and what’s meaningful demands contending with. And so, matters that matter little or not at all gain traction by virtue of the fact that they found enough initial friction to start moving.
  • The platform is optimized to make the nonevent of its own exaggerated demise seem significant.
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  • the very existence of tweets about an event can make that event seem newsworthy—by virtue of having garnered tweets. This supposed newsworthiness can then result in literal news stories, written by journalists and based on inspiration or sourcing from tweets themselves, or it can entail the further spread of a tweet’s message by on-platform engagement, such as likes and quote tweets. Either way, the nature of Twitter is to assert the importance of tweets.
  • Tweets appear more meaningful when amplified, and when amplified they inspire more tweets in the same vein. A thing becomes “tweetworthy” when it spreads but then also justifies its value both on and beyond Twitter by virtue of having spread. This is the “famous for being famous” effect
  • This propensity is not unique to Twitter—all social media possesses it. But the frequency and quantity of posts on Twitter, along with their brevity, their focus on text, and their tendency to be vectors of news, official or not, make Twitter a particularly effective amplification house of mirrors
  • At least in theory. In practice, Twitter is more like an asylum, inmates screaming at everyone and no one in particular, histrionics displacing reason, posters posting at all costs because posting is all that is possible
  • Twitter shapes an epistemology for users under its thrall. What can be known, and how, becomes infected by what has, or can, be tweeted.
  • Producers of supposedly actual news see the world through tweet-colored glasses, by transforming tweets’ hypothetical status as news into published news—which produces more tweeting in turn.
  • For them, and others on this website, it has become an awful habit. Habits feel normal and even justified because they are familiar, not because they are righteous.
  • Twitter convinced us that it mattered, that it was the world’s news service, or a vector for hashtag activism, or a host for communities without voices, or a mouthpiece for the little gal or guy. It is those things, sometimes, for some of its users. But first, and mostly, it is a habit.
  • We never really tweeted to say something. We tweeted because Twitter offered a format for having something to say, over and over again. Just as the purpose of terrorism is terror, so the purpose of Twitter is tweeting.
Javier E

If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...covid-lessons-learned-9dd5566f

politics us history crisis culture policy trump pandemic response science psychology

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets
  • A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
  • The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.
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  • “My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”
  • , “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.
  • Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”
  • We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  
  • We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources
  • In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology
  • and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.
  • Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”
  • By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.
  • , the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.
  • “The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”
  • people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.
  • Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.
  • Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.
  • just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.
  • While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.
  • doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.
  • For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying
  • To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.
  • If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.
  • t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.
  • The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.
  • The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
  • Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  
  • The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,
  • If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic
  • If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled
  • It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.
  • With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.
  • Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions
  • t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.
  • it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise
  • In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized
  • respiratory conditions.
  • Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had
  •  A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.
  • If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.
Javier E

Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-tight-loose-state.html

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
  • In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
  • titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
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  • Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
  • The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
  • states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
  • Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
  • “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
  • The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
  • The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
  • Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
  • In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
  • The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
  • cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
  • The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
  • My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
  • Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
  • Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
  • If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
  • Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
  • As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
  • She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
  • Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
  • Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
  • Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
  • conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
  • Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
  • For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
  • Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
  • We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
  • Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
  • A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
  • What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
  • Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
  • Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
  • I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
  • Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
  • Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
  • I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
  • There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
  • I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
  • Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
  • t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
  • They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
  • Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
  • Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
  • It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
  • While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
  • there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
  • While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
  • For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
  • Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
  • We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
  • In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
  • Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
  • “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
  • In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
  • society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
  • The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
  • The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
  • or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
  • Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
  • Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
  • Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
  • The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
  • — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
Javier E

Synthetic Thinking | Jerome Groopman | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...hetic-thinking-jerome-groopman

medicine political theory writing synthesis progress adaptation identity

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?
  • Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy
  • I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.
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  • Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.
  • The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.
  • The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?
  • I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous
  • that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.
  • Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 
  • The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.
  • There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I
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